Nothing
by Avid fangirl for life
Summary: After all, you tell yourself, it's not like you're hurting any one but yourself. She didn't come after you, she didn't fight for you, she said you meant nothing. So you let your heart break and hope that she managed to fix her marriage. You may be miserable but that doesn't mean you want her to be. You hope she's happy. She should be. After all, you meant nothing. Didn't you?
1. Chapter 1

You're sat in Regina's walk in closet, your back leaning against the door. You're still sat in the same position at you were five hours ago, when Regina had unceremoniously shoved you in here with your bundle of clothes, warning you to be quiet. Robin had come home from work early, some how he had found out about the two of you. You're not quite sure how, you had been so careful. You suppose it was only a matter of time until this whole sordid affair blew up in your face. Not that you regret a second of it, hell how could you?

It had all been Regina's idea, and of course you had jumped at the chance. Like you'd ever of been able to tell her no. You'd been in love with her from the first moment you'd laid eyes on her. She'd told you that her husband meant nothing to her, that she wanted you to help her escape from him, not permanently but temporarily. Of course you'd jumped at the chance, consequences be damned. What of it if you couldn't look Robin in the eye any more? What of it if your insides burnt with shame as soon as she pushed you away as soon as you were done.

When you and Regina are together, when she's coming undone beneath your hands, lips chanting your name, hands gripping the bed sheets, chest heaving, that's something you could never regret. As time has passed something tender had grown between you, she'd made you feel loved. You so desperately wanted her to love you, you had spent so many restless nights awake craving it. Knowing it was something unattainable, something that would likely never have. Like a fool you had allowed yourself to fall for the feeling regardless. Despite having a family now you'd never quite gotten over the habit of searching for morsels of love wherever you could find them. Old habits die hard, you'd think that Neal was enough proof of that for you. Apparently not.

So now, well over a year later, you find yourself sat in Regina's closet, pressed against the door, legs cramping and muscles tensed. Several times you had tried to force yourself to stop, to be honourable like so many people thought you were. The saviour, the honourable Sheriff. Of only they knew, if only they could see you now. You'd learnt much about yourself over the past year, you were about as far from honourable as it was possible to get. No matter how hard you'd tried to resist, all it took was a text from Regina and you'd come running at her beck and call.

They're in the bedroom again, they've been shouting for a little more than an hour. You can hear every word, the door's really not very thick. You can hear the pleading note in Regina's voice, the hint of panic creeping up her throat. Hardly noticeable, making her voice just a tad more high pitched than it should be. You know that you shouldn't be attuned enough to Regina's emotions to notice things like this.

You try and tune them out, because really, you don't want to consider how much pain you've caused, you've ripped their marriage apart at the seams. A part of you knows that that's not fair, Regina came to you, she started this. But you're the one who said yes and you're the one who continued it. You're the one who came running every time she said she wanted you, because the thrill of being wanted by some one you loved drove you mad, like a dog with a bone. It works to some degree, their voices become a buzzing noise in the background, Regina more in focus than Robin. You focus on the pain you're in, the cramps and aches and spasms. It feels like retribution for the damage you've caused, karma and everything.

You hear a loud and rather panicked shout from Regina, and you blink dully. It takes a few seconds for it to sink in, after all, you've been sat in this closet for almost six hours. Her words register and you can pinpoint the exact moment that your world crashes around your ears and your heart breaks into a million jagged pieces. Regina had just screamed at her husband "She means nothing to me!" You dully note the sound of Regina sobbing before the sounds becomes muffled. After a while the sounds change and you hear Regina gasp in a way that she swore only you had ever made her, and like the idiot you are you had believed her.

You try your utmost hardest to tune out the sounds, you really do. But every sound seems to be amplified tenfold. You press the heels of your palms against your ears, so hard that for a second you worry you might cause damage, but you can still hear them. The sounds keep replaying in your mind, one continuous loop.

Of course you knew they had sex, they're married, and you're not totally inept. It had been so damned easy to pretend though. To pretend that you were the only one that Regina wanted, that you were the only one allowed to touch her. You so badly wanted to be the only one to touch her, kiss her, be with her, that you had managed to convince yourself of it. You learn a valuable lesson after six hours and twelve minutes in the closet, and that is that fantasies are a dangerous thing.

After a while, the noises stop. You hear a bed creak, and someone wandering around. You hope, for Regina's sake (and that makes you hate yourself just a little bit more) that if its Robin he doesn't come into the closet. From the sounds of things he dresses and makes some excuse about needing time to himself. After he leaves every thing is quiet. You make yourself stand and dress, awkwardly, with a lot of fumbling involved.

Finally, you hear Regina moving towards the door and you steel yourself. You can feel the walls that haven't been in place for so long rising. The door handle bends, and you know you must look a mess. In a sick and twisted way that bothers you, because she won't find you beautiful when she sees you like this. She opens the door slowly and you can feel your heart thud in your chest. It feels heavy, a lead weight, hard and dull.

She looks at you, chewing her lip, wringing her hands in front of her and it makes your heart break all over again. Despite your walls you can feel your bottom lip tremble and the tears fall. She reaches for you then, and she says your name, in a voice so small and broken that you almost want to comfort her. Almost. You flinch away from her touch and she backs away from the doorway as though burned, arm still raised towards you.

You feel a need rise within you, something you haven't felt in well over half a decade. A need to run, as far away from this awful place as possible. With it comes the ability to clamp down on your emotions, the ability to push everything down to below the surface where it belongs.

You push past Regina, and you're well on your way to escape, already at her bedroom door, before you hear her voice, panic filled and frightened.

"Emma, wait!"

You tense and briefly hesitate, you chance a glance back at her. She looks more vulnerable than you've ever seen her. Her face tear streaked, her lip quivering, whole form trembling, her arm wrapped protectively around her middle. You want to go to her, more than anything in the world, your heartbreak be damned, but her words hold you back. You mean nothing to her. Nothing.

All she had ever said to you had been a lie, she wanted her husband all along. She made that clear to you. So although you hesitate, long enough to look bad, long enough to break your heart even further and have it trampled some more, you don't stop. You carry on going, out of her bedroom, out of Mifflin street, out of Storybrooke and out of her life.

After all, you tell yourself, it's not like you're hurting any one but yourself. She didn't come after you, she didn't fight for you, she said you meant nothing. So you let your heart break and hope that she managed to fix her marriage. You may be miserable but that doesn't mean you want her to be.

You hope she's happy. She should be. After all, you meant nothing. Didn't you?


	2. Chapter 2

It's been a long eighteen months since you left Storybrooke, and not once have you returned. You know that you should, it's your home, it's where your family is and most of all its where you belong. It's strange to think that after a lifetime of running you finally managed to lay roots. It's even stranger that, for the first time since you started running, you actually find yourself missing a place.

So many nights, you've laid awake trying to work up the courage and strength to go back and face what you know you'll have to face eventually. After all, you're a grown up now, you can only run for so long before the world will catch up with you. You just can't though. You've spent the last year and a half trying to piece your fractured heart back together, and you have yet to have any form of success in doing so.

It shouldn't be so hard, after all you had your entire life to practice it. Normally, you're able to detach yourself from a situation so fast that it sometimes frightens you. In the past it had been useful, being able to experience humiliation and pain at the hands of another as though you were simply watching. It had always made things easier to process. At the same time it had made emotions that much harder to deal with on the odd occasions that they did arise.

You've always been able to do being alone, before Storybrooke it was the way you preferred to live. No attachments, no commitments, no promises to keep, no one relying on you. Now though, every thing is so much different. You miss your parents and your little brother and the quaint yet mildly worrying fairy tale characters. You miss your son, so much so that you live with a constant ache for him in your chest. You miss his impish grin, his sparkling eyes, his plans. You speak to him on the phone as often as possible, so long as he is not with his other mother, but you can't help but feel like it's no longer enough.

No matter how much it kills you to admit it to yourself as well, you miss her. You miss Regina, your body aches for her and your heart fills empty with out her to fill it. You know that you meant nothing to her, less than nothing even, but you can't help but want her so badly that it leaves you breathless. Most nights you wake, her name falling from your lips, a picture of her burned into the back of your eyelids. You know that she doesn't think of you, or if she does you know that for her it's not the same, but that doesn't lessen what you feel for her.

That increases your self loathing ten fold. You've always had your demons, buried beneath the surface, representations of the uglier parts of yourself that you'd rather ignore than deal with, but now they run rampant. Ever since that night, the night where everything came crashing down around your ears in the most painful of manners, you have found your hate for yourself growing more and more. Although it's always been there to remind you that you are not worthy, that you're not good enough, that you're nothing, it's never been this bad before.

Throughout your sordid affair with Regina, you had felt it growing, scratching away beneath the surface, wearing away your resistance to it. Every time you had come together, it had chipped away at your defences, wearing you down. Regina had managed to keep it at bay with her words of love and whispers of sweet nothings. You had known what you were doing was wrong, and you had felt guilty, but at the same time it had felt right. When Regina had touched you, when the world narrowed and your vision tunnelled so that it was just the two of you, you had forgotten for a little while. Her touch ignited something within you for a while that burned away every self doubt you had ever had and everything else, until your entire world was compromised of just her. She had consumed you, but you had never been able to bring yourself to mind.

So now it's been eighteen months, the longest of your life, and you miss home more than you ever thought was possible. You're too much of a coward to return though. When you're on the verge of packing up and going home, always in the middle of the night, you find ways to convince yourself not to. You tell yourself that by going back, you have to face what you did. You have to face the disappointment from your parents, the confusion from Henry- "Wait, you and Mom were together?"- and most of all you would have to face Regina. You tell yourself that if you go back and if Regina and Robin managed to fix their sham of a marriage (not that you're bitter or anything) then by going back you would be putting a nasty strain on their already fragile reconciliation. You don't allow yourself to be reasonable here, because it would be easy to ask Henry and really, it was Regina who started this whole affair. You tell yourself that you have a comfortable life here, you've made acquaintances, you have a job and an apartment, you make regular money. You tell yourself that you just need time away from there, time to heal and time to regather yourself and rebury the loathing you feel every time you look in the mirror. You tell yourself that it's not a matter of if you go back but rather when, any thing to buy yourself a little bit of extra time.

Realistically, you know that you don't have much more time before your family find you. They missed out on so much of your life that you know that their patience is goring thin. They gave you time to heal, but there's only so much time to give. You suppose that having missed nearly thirty years of your life, and with that missing most of the milestones every parent should see, you can only expect so much time for yourself.

In a way, you know that it was selfish of you to leave. You should of stayed and acted like the adult you are supposed to be. You should have stayed and dealt with the heart break like a mature member of the world rather than running like you did when you were a scared teen trying to escape the system you had found yourself stuck in since birth. But you didn't. You should have stayed for Henry. He had deserved better of you, though you know that he understood your need for time, you still feel that you should have stayed and worked through your feeling. You should have just steered clear of Regina.

You torment yourself with endless circles like this most nights. Long after the rest of the world has gone to sleep you find yourself sat up in bed, propped up by pillows or lying flat, thoughts whirling through your head so fast that they make you dizzy. Most of the time you find that it is impossible to keep up with everything that passes through your head. You find that you almost never sleep any more. You always dream of Regina when you do and so you deprive yourself of this. The dreams are both a blessing and a curse to you. On the one hand, they make the shame branded forever on you more prominent as every day passes. You're sure that it would be long until there is a red letter A embroidered on your soul for all to see. On the other hand these dreams provide a welcome reprieve from the constant cycle of thoughts. They bring memories of nights in Regina's arms to the forefront of your mind.

Some nights the thoughts aren't so fast. Some nights you simply replay the past. A memory that haunts you and simply refuses to leave are the five simple words that shattered the entire make believe world that you had built around yourself.

"She means nothing to me!"

It is on such a night, with these words bouncing through your mind, each version crueller than the last, that a little after three in the morning you are brought out of your thoughts by somebody pounding on your front door. You presume it's just a drunk from the tiny bar next door, after all it's only just hit closing hours and it's not exactly an uncommon occurrence. There's little cause for complaint from you though, the rent's cheap and the land lady reasonable. You ignore it, knowing from past experience that it'll go away eventually. A drunk's attention span only lasts so long when faced with an inanimate object after all.

You ignore it and after about five minutes of incessant knocking the pounding goes away. You relax a little, because damn if that wasn't starting to grate on your last nerve. Normally it wouldn't, but you're tired and irritated and you haven't had a full nights' sleep in well over a year. Fifteen years ago that wouldn't have been a problem but you're no longer eighteen years old. Drunks from next door should stuff it.

You start to drift off, the beginnings of a dream just starting to form on the edges of your subconscious, it feels pleasant and warm and comforting like the mayor's arms encircling your waist from behind and her deep, liquid voice chuckling next to your ear as she holds you to her front. Even in your dozy state you recognise how fucked up it is that the woman who broke your heart still has enough of a hold over you to be your source of comfort in your dreams. Then again you suppose she's one of the only people who ever cared enough (or pretended to) to provide you with comfort. Just as you are about to surrender to sleep and let sleep fully claim you, the banging on your door starts again, even more rapid than the first bout.

You're more pissed than you've been in months. This makes the banging deliberate and therefore personal. You're just not in the mood for that, all you want is to give the person on the other side of the door a piece of your mind. You can't help but wonder who it could possibly be, who cares enough to practically bang down your door in the middle of the night? You don't really care though, you're gearing yourself up to scream at the person on the other side of the door. You know it'll be a good release, and to be honest the asshole deserves it, it is the middle of the night after all. You don't care about waking the other occupants of the building, you're the only occupied flat on this floor and your neighbours on other floors are none too considerate.

You reach the front door just as the knocking stops, but you have a feeling that the person is still stood on the other side of the door. You find yourself idly wondering if there could be danger in the other side of the door, but you're so far beyond angry in this moment that you're done caring.

You reach for the door handle, yank the door open, puffing yourself up to yell at the fucking idiot on the other side of the door, and find your breath catching in your throat. The woman on the other side of the door is more familiar to you than the back of your hand. Seeing her makes your heart thump and your blood seethe in your veins. You find that this makes for a very confusing mix. She looks at you and you deflate, all the fight and anger leaving you on an exhale.

She looks at you, taking a deep and shaky breath. You know that you must look like shit. You're dressed in ratty clothes that are so far beyond crumpled it's pitiful, your hair needed a wash two days ago, you've lost a lot of weight over the past year and a half and the bags beneath your eyes are so dark now that you don't even bother trying to hide them most of the time. She looks more beautiful than ever to you, but you still can't bring yourself to hate her, even if that would be so far beyond justified at this point.

She's still looking at you, and the tears in her eyes are casing you even more pain. The way she's looking at you is so beyond intense and it's too much and you can't cope and you can feel the panic starting to rise within you. And so, in a moment of pure self preservation you use the hand still holding the door to slam it closed.

You're quick but you've forgotten that she knows you too well, she probably expects something like this and somehow she gets her foot in the door before you manage to close it. You slump even further. She pushes the door open, wincing at the pain in her foot from where the door hit her killer heels. You want to feel some form of vindictive pleasure at having caused her some level of pain, but all you feel is a mild sense of guilt that makes you hate yourself a little bit more.

Then she looks at you and you look at her and something about the intensity and something more makes you want to panic and push her out of your apartment and demand that she never comes back. The look reminds you of the blissful afternoons spent together in secret, hushed whispers and breathless gasps, pleas for more and a chant of your name. It reminds you of everything that you have striven to forget but could never quite bring yourself to discard.

She's standing just inside your doorway and the way she's looking at you is too much, so you try to focus on any thing else. You still look at her, because really with her in the room how are your eyes supposed to be drawn to anything or anyone else? But you look at her body instead, and although it reminds you of how much you miss her being pressed against you, it's much less painful than looking into her eyes. You feel like you're betraying yourself, but you can't seem to help it as your eyes search out the fourth finger of her left hand.

You curse yourself and your traitor body for your heart skipping a beat when you find it bare, her olive skin has never looked better, in your opinion. Even as your heart skips a beat, you feel your self loathing grow in its multitude, clawing ever closer to the surface, barely beneath your skin any more. You caused this. You don't know why she's here, but you caused her marriage to break down. You caused the end of her picture perfect fairy tale happy ending.

To be fair to yourself, it wasn't all you, she initiated it and carried it on. But you caused it. Why did she have to come?

Her being this close to you, her being inside your crappy apartment, is causing your heart to beat erratically and unevenly and your head to become more confused by the minute. You mean nothing to her, everything she ever said to you was a lie, so why is she here?

You find your gaze is drawn back to her eyes,still staring into your soul with the same unwavering intensity. You have to actively remind yourself that you mean nothing to her, and that you never did to stop yourself from doing something stupid. Like shivering. Or falling in love with her all over again.

Her lips draw up into that same hopeful, watery smile that you've seen there a hundred times, both in reality and your dreams -though your dreams never measure up to reality, despite them lacking the pain- and damn you're doing something stupid. She takes a further step into your apartment, closer to you, the door swinging shut on its hinges as she lets it go. A soft click signifies that you are alone together after everything, in a way that you never expected to happen. In a way that you were not expecting. The silence stretches on until she breaks it, her voice shy yet sure, hesitant yet somehow hopeful (hopeful for what you have no idea).

"Hello Emma."


	3. Chapter 3

It has been almost exactly eighteen months since you last saw Emma. The last time you saw her was as she emerged from your walk in closet, broken and defeated, and ran out of your life for what you know was supposed to be for good. The last time you saw her, you trampled over both of your hearts and shattered them into pieces.

You can honestly say that night was one of the worst in the entirety of your existence, and suffice it to say that there are many nights that are contenders. If there is one thing you can honestly say has deepened your self loathing it was the way you treated Emma. What makes it so much worse is that you know it could have been avoided if you had just been honest from the beginning.

The look on Emma's face when she emerged from the closet, broken and so very pained yet with walls built high around her once again, is ingrained into your very being. Every time you close your eyes you can see the way she looked at you. It was a look of complete heart break and yet it had been curiously blank at the same time. You never wanted to make her look at you like that again.

At the time you had found yourself reaching for her, all you had wanted to do was take everything back, you had wanted to take away the pain you had caused and make every thing better. You had wanted to tell her that you hadn't meant a word you had said, and that you had acted out of fear. Not of your husband but of the unknown.

You had no longer loved Robin when your affair began, and he no longer loved you, but you had been able to live together. You had become comfortable in your routine, and you had found some comfort in the monotony of your marriage. For you, your marriage had become a layer of protection, and that had been something you couldn't quite face giving up, not quite so soon and in such a scandalous way. Emma have provided you with happiness, and with a sense of closeness that you had never before felt and on return you had broken both of your hearts. And for what? A sham of a marriage that had barely kept itself glued together.

The second she had run out of your life, you were cursing yourself and your inability to let go and just let yourself be happy. You had yourself on a self destructive cycle that you couldn't seem to break yourself of. Every time happiness came almost within reach, you had a way of stooping yourself from grasping it. That night, all you had to do was get dressed and bring Emma down stairs with you. All you had to do was tell Robin the truth.

Instead you had lied through your teeth, as it had become second nature to you, you had found yourself screaming "She means nothing to me!". You hadn't meant to say it, you couldn't have meant it any less. The second it had been spoken you knew it would be impossible to take back, to fix, just as you had known that Emma had heard every word. You had known that she had heard every word, and you had let yourself fight the urge of running to the closet to refute what you had just said. Now you know that you shouldn't have fought it.

The second it had passed your lips, an ache unlike any other had spread through out your chest. You had never felt a pain like it before. It was a dull ache, a thrumming pain inside of you that spread with every heart beat. Your self loathing had spread ten fold, boiling like poison beneath your skin. You hated yourself for hurting Emma, because that was something you had stopped wanting to do a very long time ago. With those words, you had known that Emma was lost to you. With Emma you had not only lost your best friend and the woman you loved, you had also lost a vital part of yourself.

In the eighteen months since that night, a lot has changed. You haven't spoken to Emma and you've stopped trying to ask your son for updates on how your son's other mother is doing. You know that Emma asked him not to tell you anything. You don't want him to feel like he's betraying her trust, she needs to be able to trust some one. That some one should be your son.

Your divorce to Robin is over and done with, and you should have felt sad that it was over. After all, he was supposed to of been your true love. You feel like fate doesn't really know any thing about human emotion in all its complexities. You felt relieved when it was all over.

You've found it harder and harder to not be near Emma, to not know anything about how she is. As time has passed, you've become more and more desperate to try and do something. You know that what you did to her cant be forgiven, and you know that what you've done isn't something that can be resolved. You know the need to see her is a selfish one, and you know that is an impulse that you should ignore. You need to see her, even if it's just so she can scream at you or slam a door in your face. Even if she just looks at you in the blank way she did on that awful, awful night.

Maybe if you know that she hates you, or feels nothing for you at all, you'll be able to move past everything. You know that it's very selfish of you, but you're so desperate that you don't care. In the past you were very good at being selfish, so you're sure you'll be able to deal with it, even if you are reformed and it costs you a sleepless night or two.

As every day passes you find yourself becoming a little bit more and more desperate. You manage to resist the impulse to find her, knowing that it's not your place, by telling yourself that she's probably almost finished healing. You know that you broke her more than words can express, and in the worse ways possible, but you think that she might actually be able to heal herself if she has the time. You're willing to put aside what you want if it means that she will be able to recover from the trauma that you put her through.

You manage to clamp down on the urge to see her until one night when Henry enters your home office after he is supposed to be in bed, his face tear stained and his lips puckered in thought, eyebrows creased in worry. When you ask him what's wrong the tears start streaming down his face again and with a sinking feeling you just know. He tells you that something is wrong with Emma and before you can register what you're doing you're both in the car and he's reeling off an address in Boston and then he's at Snow's and you're driving through the dark.

You drive so fast through the night that you don't give yourself time to think about what it is exactly that you're doing. You arrive in Boston in much less time than it should take, and you know that it's a miracle that you didn't crash. You pull up to the curb outside of a bar, next to which is a building that looks about one bad storm from falling down.

Before you can process what exactly it is that you're doing, you're in front of Emma's flat, pounding on the door like a woman possessed despite the fact that it is well after three in the morning. After a time you stop pounding and you hear a crash and a muffled curse on the other side of the door and your mind goes blank and god what are you doing here, and why are you doing this. She doesn't want to see you, and you can't blame her. You shouldn't be here, you shouldn't be. You should leave before she knows that you're here, it will be less painful for her. You're supposed to stay away so that she can heal. You're just about to turn around and leave when the door opens and you're face to face with a scowling Emma.


End file.
